


The Worth of Things

by Paper_Crane_Song



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e12 Concrete Overcoat Affair Part II, Friendship, Gen, s03e13 The Abominable Snowman Affair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 18:58:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8908201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paper_Crane_Song/pseuds/Paper_Crane_Song
Summary: A rare, discordant note is struck in their friendship, but before it can be fully resolved Illya goes missing in the Himalayas.





	

**Author's Note:**

> _Meistens belehrt uns erst der Verlust über den Wert der Dinge._  
>  _Mostly it is loss which tells us about the worth of things._  
>  \- Arthur Schopenhauer
> 
> This story takes place in between _The Concrete Overcoat Affair_ and _The Abominable Snowman Affair._
> 
> Your thoughts and comments would be greatly appreciated.

A girl Napoleon was seeing on a casual basis had given him a kitten. The kitten had lasted, but the girl didn't. Illya had seen the scratch marks on his hand, commented on it, and Napoleon had had no choice but to tell him the whole story.

The next day Illya said, “I'll take your cat from you. There's an old dear living next door to me who seems lonely.”

“Would you?” Napoleon tapped him lightly on the shoulder with his notepad. “A friend in need and all that. Say, would you mind picking it up tonight? Waverly's got me booked on the early flight to Geneva tomorrow.”

Illya had dropped round while he was packing, hanging back slightly as if unsure of how to act in Napoleon's private space even though this was not the first time he'd been there.

“It's over in the corner,” Napoleon said with a gesture, heading back to the open suitcase on his bed. “Fix yourself a drink whilst you're at it,” he called.

But when he returned, he saw his partner kneeling down, face to face with the kitten. “You kept her in a cage all this time?” Illya said, his voice soft and melodic as he pushed his fingers through the bars. “Oh Napoleon.”

“I don't take kindly to cat hair on my suits.” He opened the drinks cabinet, took out two glasses.

“This is no way to keep an animal.”

“You're forgetting that I didn't ask for it.”

“You didn't refuse, either. Any girl with a pretty face and you're like putty in her hands. Isn't that the expression?”

Napoleon looked up from pouring the drinks, stung not so much by the words but by the undercurrent of bitterness underneath. “Am I that predictable?” he said lightly.

Illya rose slowly. “Yes. You are.” He accepted the drink offered and proceeded to nurse it in moody silence.

“Is something wrong?” Napoleon said after a moment. He didn't understand Illya when he was like this. It happened less and less, but there were still times when Napoleon said something or did something that Illya took offence to, and then he was reminded with full force again of the differences between them, differences that everyone else saw and occasionally dared to remark upon but that he'd long ceased caring about.

Eventually Illya said, “Do you remember Miss Diketon?”

_Illya on the boat amidst the cacophony of Italian voices, pale and stiff with pain._

But he only said, “Of course I do.”

Illya was swirling his drink, head bowed. “It's been a long time since I've hated anyone as much as I hated her.”

At first he was gratified by his partner's honesty, but then Illya raised his head and he saw his expression. “When I came back from the launch room you were cradling her in your arms.”

He felt threatened, a need to stand, to put space between himself and Illya, and it was only force of will that kept him sitting on the barstool. “I didn't know what she'd done to you,” he began, but Illya cut him off.

“You knew she was Thrush.” Illya stood then. “Anyway, it's not about that. I've had worse.”

“Then what -”

“She told me that she and the Nazi scientist were soulmates. Do you know what the Nazis did to my people, Napoleon? To my country? She was cruel and she deserved to die alone and hurting, but you held her and caressed her like she was one of your conquests. Because she was pretty.”

“Now wait just a minute,” Napoleon said, rising, goaded into a reply, “it wasn't like that and you know it. I was just treating her like a human being. I was giving her a dignified death. That's what separates us from the likes of Nazis and Thrush.”

But Illya had turned away.

Napoleon watched him in silence as he picked up the bag of cat food and the other items and balanced them on top of the cage before lifting it.

“Look, I'm sorry,” Napoleon said into the space between them.

Illya halted, his arms full. “No, it is I who should apologise.”

“Why don't you stay? I'll make us some dinner.”

But Illya was shaking his head. “It's getting late.”

“Come now, I insist - ” he was cut off by the sound of his communicator, and when he turned back Illya was gone.

 

* * *

 

The distress lingered even as he woke the next morning. During the long flight to Switzerland it hummed underneath like white noise and stayed with him as he began his assignment. He tried to forget about it, reasoning he'd catch up with Illya once he returned to New York. But then the dreams began, and he found himself reporting in each day hoping that perhaps it would be Illya who'd answer instead of one of the secretaries. It was foolish; in the past when they were on separate assignments they'd often gone weeks without talking to each other, and yet now he was surprised by how badly he wanted to hear his partner's voice.

His work during the day served as a distraction, and in the evenings he'd go for drinks with the other agents at the bar down on the waterfront. He felt like a stranger amongst them, with their unfamiliar accents and mannerisms even though he knew most of these men, had been through survival school with at least half of them. He was starting to get the curious sensation that Illya had never existed, that he was a figure from a fairytale dreamt up by his own mind, until one evening he heard the name _Kuryakin_ and it was as if an electrical current had passed through him. One of the Uncle agents was retelling an anecdote, and somehow Illya was part of it.

“He's your partner now isn't he?” someone else asked him, after the anecdote ended.

“Ah yes, yes he is.” He offered them nothing else, and in the absence of his lead to follow they had fallen silent, unsure of what to say, what they _could_ say, how far they could go and whether he would agree with them.

“Another round, gentlemen?” he said, smiling too broadly, and as he looked at these men he felt different, set apart, because he owned a secret in the form of a sullen Russian partner and a friendship that went wholly beyond the bounds of conventionality and respectability. He didn't know how to explain their partnership to these men, and he didn't want to, either. Did they feel the same way about their partners? He suspected not. And still the dreams continued until he began to wake feeling Illya's absence like a physical ache, a wound he could almost cover on his side with the palm of his hand.

Upon returning to the New York office he was told that Illya was on assignment in the Himalayas. He went through the motions, acting on autopilot, outwardly appearing his usual sharp, professional self, if a little detached. When Waverley told him that Illya had gone missing, this too seemed inevitable, and so he headed to Ghupat with a sense of finality and dread.

He was drawn to Amra because she spoke of Illya as a real, living presence, and in her words he dared to hope that she was speaking Illya back into the world which he had fallen out of.

“ _You had a dream last night. You are worried about a_ _man with golden hair. The thought of it is still in your mind.”_

“ _Is he your_ _friend?"_

And once:

“ _You miss him.”_

And when he first heard Illya's voice again, after so much time had passed and the distance between them had seemed to solidify into something sad and irrevocable, it seemed fitting that after so many days defined by his absence, the first word Illya said was his name.

 

 _Finis_  


End file.
